Society

The Proustian Bargain

Collecting the cream of the magazine’s back-page Proust Questionnaire in a new book, V.F.’s editor explains why this celebrated interrogation, which dates back to 19th-century Parisian salons, remains so popular—and so revealing. Plus: Answer your own Proust Questionnaire using your Facebook account, and view excerpts from the book.

If you are one of those for whom the very word “questionnaire” recalls the horrors of wasted afternoons at the Department of Motor Vehicles or visits to the emergency room or dentist’s office, there is, I trust, at least one questionnaire you’ll find agreeable: the list of some two dozen questions that Marcel Proust answered in the 1880s and that, in their modern incarnation, enliven the last page of our magazine each issue. This month, it so happens, we’re publishing Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire, with Rodale. The book showcases responses from scores of outsize cultural icons who have appeared in our pages—a handful of whom are displayed here in illustrations by Robert Risko, a consummate caricaturist, who excels at compressing the essence of each of his subjects into a few exuberant lines.

For 16 years now, Vanity Fair has been asking some of the most celebrated figures of our times to respond to this set of probing personal queries as a way of taking their psychic measure. In the process, a few misconceptions have arisen about the enterprise (which has become a much-copied magazine and newspaper feature). First, the Proust Questionnaire was dreamed up neither by Vanity Fair nor indeed by Proust. In fact, it was a Parisian parlor game among the novelist’s bourgeois crowd, and it is believed to have been popularized by the daughter of the 19th-century French president Félix Faure. “Antoinette Faure’s Album”—a red leather journal adorned with an ornate, blind-embossed trellis—contained entries from many in Faure’s social circle. She would invite friends over for tea and then ask each an identical sequence of questions: “[What is] your favourite virtue?&hellip; Your idea of misery?&hellip; Your present state of mind?,” and so forth. They would all answer, in longhand, in her little red book.

Proust, who twice filled out Faure’s form with precocious gusto—at ages 14 and 20—subsequently published his answers as “Salon Confidences Written by Marcel,” in an 1892 article in La Revue Illustrée XV. His name would become associated with the questionnaire posthumously (he died of pneumonia in 1922) once the list was adopted more widely in France, Britain, and America as a form of 20th-century pre-pop psychology.

As I mentioned, Vanity Fair took up the game in 1993. I had become editor of the magazine the previous year and sought the advice of Henry Porter (who became our London editor in 1992) about ideas for possible columns. Henry mentioned that in 1989, when he was the launch editor of London’s Sunday Correspondent magazine, his friend Gilbert Adair, the gifted novelist (who for years had taught school in France), urged him to consider the old drawing-room diversion for the weekend magazine. The recommendation “was greeted with widespread skepticism,” Adair now recalls, “until I rather cynically pointed out that the advantage of questionnaires, from a financial point of view, was that not one of the celebrities who agree to submit [answers] expect to be paid. The suggestion was immediately adopted.” The feature, Henry says, was a hit from the start, “and it is one of the things that lasts from the Sunday Correspondent“—in readers’ Proustian memories.

I asked Henry, and Aimée Bell—an old Spy magazine hand who had come to Vanity Fair with me, and who is now one of my deputy editors—to reprise an updated version of the questionnaire in our pages, and we prepared a list of luminaries from all walks of public life who might be willing to subject themselves to the same scrutiny. We were off and running. And today the page remains one of the staples of the magazine.

At Vanity Fair we’ve learned a thing or two about human nature through our years of fielding Proust replies. If you’re surprised by the staggering level of honesty that occasionally graces our questionnaire page each month (particularly among Hollywood mandarins), you’re not alone. When asked to name the one thing she would change about herself, Jane Fonda responded, “My inability to have a long-term intimate relationship.” When asked how she would like to die, Hedy Lamarr revealed, “Preferably after sex.” (She was 85 when she gave that reply.) When asked in 2003 about his greatest extravagance, the soon-to-be governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, admitted in one of the more authentically witty questionnaires we have received, “I am a major shoe queen.” (His greatest fear? “I am petrified of bikini waxing. I had a very bad experience in 1978.”)

When it comes to sheer effrontery, there’s little doubt that comedians have been the most facile players. Martin Short’s greatest achievement: “My invention of cold fusion.” The trait David Steinberg most deplores in others: “Outing a C.I.A. agent because you’re pissed about something else.” The phrases Elaine May most overuses: “‘You’re kidding’ and ‘Oh, fuck’ and ‘Oh, fuck, you’re kidding.’”

On occasion, there has even been some consensus. Eight contributors said they were smitten with Paris. Two said they identified with Jesus, two with Moses, and one with Robert Moses (Donald Trump). The person most frequently cited as most admired? Nelson Mandela (mentioned nine times). The virtue considered most overrated? Virginity—in a landslide. Over the years, we’ve noticed, virtually everyone has had at least one or two moments of pure, unbridled candor. What would Karl Rove change? “[I’d] be more patient.” (I’ll say.) Ted Kennedy? “I’d have won in 1980,” so the senator said, in his 2006 entry. And several, naturally, admitted that death was their darkest fear. “Trust me,” insisted Larry King, who survived a heart attack in 1987, “I saw no lights, no angels—nothing.”

Amid the tumult and the dread, amid these many attempts to tackle the overarching issues of love and death and the meaning of life, there have been flashes of Proustian poetry. Walter Cronkite once confided that, if he could be reincarnated, he would choose to return as “a seagull—graceful in flight, rapacious in appetite.” Allen Ginsberg’s most marked characteristic, he said, was his “incriminating eloquence.” While Julia Child most abhorred “a dreadful meal badly served,” William F. Buckley Jr. claimed to hate “lousy logic, tempestuously waged.” Joan Didion, when asked “When and where were you happiest?,” referred to a character in a passage from her novel Democracy: “She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges.” And Johnny Cash offered this six-word description of paradise: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

You can try your own hand at playing Proust on our Proust Facebook app, which allows you to answer the questionnaire and share your answers with your friends. Just be sure to bring along the madeleines.